Welcome to Testathon 6.0!

DSpace Development never stops! DSpace 6.0 is almost here, and with it arrive numerous new features, improvements, bug-fixes, changes, etc.

We ask that you take a few minutes of your time in these coming weeks to help us fully test this new release! We want to ensure we are maintaining the same level of quality that you come to expect out of a new DSpace release. We'd also love to hear your early feedback on 6.0!

WHO: You! Everyone is invited to take part. Whether you manage multiple instances, or are interested in trying it out, we welcome your feedback.

WHAT: Help beta-test DSpace 6.0 to ensure that it passes its ultimate test: that it does what users expect it to. We've added new features (see Release Notes and Changes in 6.x) that could use more eyes, browsers, and mouse-clicks to make sure that things aren't missing, that they don't break, that they don't lose your data, and that they easily do what one expects them to do. So if any features have issues while your testing it, click the "Feedback" button and tell us about it.

WHEN: Monday, April 25 through Friday, May 6, 2016. You can keep visiting the site and post your feedback, as part of continual improvement.

WHY: The sooner we find and fix bugs, the higher quality the software will be when it comes time to upgrade or install DSpace 6.0.

HOW: Go to http://demo.dspace.org and test-drive one of the DSpace User Interfaces, such as JSPUI or XMLUI. If anything comes up while you are testing DSpace, you can click the blue "Feedback" button on the page (which creates a new ticket in our DSpace Issue Tracker). We're looking for feedback on the DSpace software, as well as feedback on our unreleased 6.0 documentation.

Or,use Vagrant-DSpace to quickly install DSpace 6.0-rc3 on a local virtual machine(e.g. VirtualBox)

Test Plans: New for the 6.0 Testathon, our DSpace Community Advisory Team (DCAT) has created public test plans for both the XMLUI and JSPUI. We encourage you to add your observations and tests to these plans. Tests are organized by user-role, where each user role is represented as a tab in these spreadsheets. Each of the tabs has a "Role Manager" who will help out with reviewing your feedback and keeping these test plans clean and consistent.

Updated Documentation for 6.0

There are substantial upgrades to the DSpace documentation for version 6.0. Volunteers are needed to review it for clarity and accuracy. Visit the DSpace 6.x Documentation page for more info.

Test Plans

Anyone is welcome to execute tests that are defined in the official JSPUI and XMLUI Test Plans. The reports in these plans should be based on observations with tests on demo.dspace.org. If you found a problem with one of the tests in your own local installation of DSpace 6, please always verify this behaviour on demo.dspace.org before reporting your feedback.

Tests are organized by user-role, where each user role is represented as a tab in these spreadsheets. Each of the tabs has a "Role Manager" who will help out with reviewing your feedback and keeping these test plans clean and consistent.

4 Comments

Folks, I wanted to report something but I had an error with the blue button (on Android using Firefox) so instead I reported it, as well as the blue button problem, thru the feedback link at the foot of the page (in the xmlui test dspace). That looked like it sent correctly, but I think we're not really expected to use that feedback link during the testathon. So could I ask please - are those messages going to a mailbox somewhere ? And is somebody monitoring it? And did they receive the message I sent 10 minutes ago? Thanks very much.

Hi Pauline Ward. The email address that the Feedback Form goes to is unmonitored (it's a dummy gmail address). However, I can verify that (after logging into the account), your email was sent along.

As for the issue with the Blue Button. Unfortunately, that sounds like an issue in JIRA (the issue tracker software we use which actually provides the blue button functionality). I'm not sure it's anything we can resolve on our end. You are welcome to enter tickets directly into JIRA if it's easier (as that's where the blue button submits to anyhow).